McScruffy & Anfurny Ride Home!
McScruffy and Anfurny, bound for a new, permanent home in Denver.
Animal rescue in the United States is a classic study in supply and demand. There’s always been more homeless and stray animals in the warmer climates than in the colder north. But in the mid-2000s, hurricane after hurricane pounded the South, leaving thousands of pets homeless. When efforts to reunite owners with their pets were unsuccessful, volunteers began setting up travel networks to send supply (in the south) to where demand for adoptable animals existed (the north). That demand has increased as hundreds of (mostly northern) cities and several states have banned retail store sales of dogs and cats in an effort to shut down abusive “puppy mills.” The ASPCA alone saw rescued pet shipments from the South grow from 500 in 2014 to more than 40,000 in 2018.
As an aside, I’ve long heard my Dad come down on puppy mills in the course of his raising Dobermans for 50 years. Our house was about as far from a puppy mill as you can imagine. When puppies naturally came along, trying to get one of them from him fell somewhere between the intense screening to adopt a child and the ordeal required before canonization as a saint, to wit: despite being a sportswriter his whole life, Dad declined to sell a puppy to a now-Hall of Fame baseball player because Dad got the sense the would-be owner wanted the Doberman as a machismo accessory.
But I digress, so I’ll just leave here an early-1980s photo of Rod Humphries with one of his beloved dogs.
Anyway, entering into the rescue dog supply-and-demand equation is Pilots N Paws, a non-profit that since at least 2008 has engaged volunteer pilots to assist in animal transportation to further the rescue, sheltering and adoption of animals. Through its incredibly active discussion board, volunteers exchange information regarding animal transports, coordinate and schedule transports, and share rescue stories. Although they probably keep more formal statistics, today their discussion board’s “Done” archive contains 23,001 listed transports. One aspect of these charitable flight opportunities that differs from most people-transports is that the timing is usually more flexible and, if you like, you can find opportunities on short notice. And it’s not all that critical that you get the puppies to sign a flight waiver….
Dog Rescuer and active PNP member Debra H. arranged adoptions in Denver for these two pups, McScruffy (a terrier mix) and Anfurny (a chi mix). They’d been picked up together roaming the Rio Grande outside of Laredo by the US Border Patrol.
At the last minute, I was able to commit to fly them from Laredo to Dallas, where they’d foster overnight and fly on to Denver the next morning. The whole route (Houston-Laredo-Dallas-Houston) is just under 1000 miles, between 5 and 6 hours of flight time.
I left Houston at 3:30 pm. I don’t recommend the summer mid-afternoon descent into Laredo to everyone: I got tossed around in quite a bit in turbulence. But when it’s just me and I don’t have passengers to worry about, that just adds to the fun. Fortunately for the puppies, it was cooler and calmer at 6 p.m. when we left Laredo.
Foster hero Misty M. (pictured above) brought McScruffy and Anfurny straight to the Laredo airport from the vet, where they’d been tagged, vaccinated, and micro-chipped. I spent a few minutes scratching them behind the ears, and they loaded up without a fuss.
The pups were excellent travelers, except for some bickering about who deserved the bigger crate…
Without a peep from the dogs, the first half of the early evening flight was uneventful, and we directly overflew downtown San Antonio, Lake Austin, and Waco. I had filed and was flying IFR, because Trump was in Dallas. As a result, the Dallas airspace was under a presidential Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) that was scheduled to still be in effect when I landed.
That’s a map of the TFR, the giant, designedly unmissable red circle on the map. Entering the outer ring requires communication with air traffic control, but the 10-mile inner ring is off limits to largely everyone except scheduled commercial flights and the military. As I approached Dallas, I was troublingly given a routing (shown) that was to take me through the middle of the inner ring. Neither Gray AFB Approach, Waco Approach, nor Fort Worth Center seemed interested in explaining why: “Ask the next controller.” I was beginning to think I was being set up, and as all pilots know, busting a presidential TFR guarantees being intercepted by an F-15 and almost certainly a suspended license…
Fortunately, Regional Approach (the air traffic control around the DFW area) finally put me out of my misery over Fort Worth, letting me know Trump left early and the TFR had expired. The rest of the flight was uneventful.
I was routed directly over the top of Love Field on the way in.
And I had a chance to snap a sunset selfie before turning east to land.
Another dog foster hero, Clarice, met me at the McKinney (northeast Dallas) airport to pick up the dogs. She would bring them right back 12 hours later for their flight on to their new, permanent home in Denver.
This was all a fairly elaborate plan, and props to the folks at Pilots N Paws and the foster volunteers who pulled it off. Everybody I met was committed to the rescue effort and delightful to deal with. I’ll do this again. I was glad to know these two pups won’t be left scrounging for morsels in the Texas desert, or worse.
I left Dallas a happy camper. In addition to the satisfaction of getting McScruffy and Anfurny halfway to their new home, I was also rewarded with the peaceful, twinkling glitter of the big city on a calm, clear night.
